Discussion Topic

There was enough information to provide CMac with what I was hoping he would consider, which was(to excerpt a portion of the email I had sent him upon creating the thread):

"I am writing again with the hopes of bringing attention to the really awful mess that has been the Supertopo forum recently. As you probably know, besides t*r having her account deactivated, there have been other well respected and prominent forum members who were upset enough over the flagrantly misogynistic attitude of some members that they have left the forum.

It seems to me that it is actually a small, but vocal minority of people who are creating a big mess, and that the majority of people posting actually are very sad that the forum community has degenerated so badly over the entire "Boobgate" as someone called.it."

I obtained my goal with the thread, and when it began to degrade, I closed it. I see a whiners thread has already been started in a pissy fit. And someone on that thread has the nerve to say that I am the hysterical one... irony at it's best.

In an unmoderated forum like McTopo, it is very hard - if well on nigh impossible - to "cross the line" and actually get yourself banned.

So what did she do?

Here you have the instance of a grown woman, age 30 plus or minus a year, who continued for years to publish thousands upon thousands of tiresome off topic posts under a variety of different user names. A quick check under her multiple personalities would reveal something in the order of twenty, thirty or perhaps even fifty thousand non-climbing posts. Perhaps 2% of the entire climbing forum taken up by one annoying person?

She does not climb, or at least couldn't do so when taken out by a few well-intentioned but later sorry forum members. Yet why does a non-climber continue to hang around a climbers' forum? This is an enduring mystery. Are there not any number of other internet forums available to people like her? Maybe she could go join the erstwhile Lois=LEB someplacee else? Someplace else very far away.

Equally irksome, she repeatedly tried to the play the "underage card" well into her 20's every time she wrote something incredibly stupid. This despite an apparent university education.

So clearly, you can be an incompetent climber, an idiot, and can clutter the forum with crap for years on end, yet none of these things was enough to get her banned. So what did she do this time?

It's called vandalism, but even the vandalism on its own was insufficient keep her banned. What Tessa did to finally nail her coffin shut was to conspire with others - or at least she attempted to do so - to have these others join her in her vandalism of Chris' website forum.

Tessa did this by emailing a number of forum members, encouraging them to "plant nuke bombs" in the forum posts. For those of you who don't know what a "nuke bomb" is [it was a new term to me too], it's a hotlink to a huge image or file that is placed directly into the forum post with the intention of rendering the post unreadable, and eating up the server's bandwidth. It is highly effective.

Imagine if I were to put a gigantic 30meg image 5000 pixels wide and tall here in this post? If it would ever load onto your computer, you wouldn't be able to read the post because of the gigantic image I put in the way. Or how about a link to a virus? I do knott specifically recall how large Tessa's "nuke bomb" images were, or what they were precisely.

At any rate, if I recall correctly, she "nuke bombed" not only the boob thread, but also the squirrel thread. It happened kind of fast, and I only caught some of it. But it appeared as though someone in admin deleted the nukes, but then only minutes later she nuke bombed the boob thread again. [Aside: I was a big fan of the boob thread so this is how I noticed what was going on, however I am only a big fan of little boobs.]

It is probable that at this point, she was banned. But after being banned on her t*r user name, Tessa immediately created a new account which was t*r2, and then she started not one but two separate threads mocking admin and the forum. That account - t*r2 - was promptly banned.

I am unsure of the exact timeline here, but it appears that when she no longer had access to the forum having been locked out, Tessa = t*r = standing strong = toulomne*rainbow [sic] = t*r2 emailed others and asked them to conspire with her to bring down the forum. In her email, which she distributed to an unknown number of users, she offered to provide "nuke bomb" links that other users could hotlink onto forum posts. It's one thing to be banned, it's another thing altogether to attempt to induce others to seek retribution when you are no longer able to do so yourself.

I could post up the text of one of her emails that reached me, although I will not reveal who sent it to me. No doubt many others receieved these emails, and could also post them up.

That's why she was banned, and I don't believe you'll ever see her back.

No...it was quite clear. I had written the reply but before I posted it, went to see if there had been any other comments to address in the interim.

I saw the thread had gotten lower on the page and figured there are plenty of people with major headaches due to all the baby behavior going on in this forum, and decided to send it directly instead of bumping the thread.